Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.

the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.

if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows thatthe Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

Every organization of men, be it social or political, ultimately relies on man's capacity for making promises and keeping them.

Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.